9:32pm July 26, 2015

➸ We Were There, Too: Black Disabled and the ADA

As we celebrate ADA 25, it’s important to keep this in mind.

One of the biggest flaws of When Billy Broke His Head was that everyone he interviewed was white, he showed lots of black people in background scenes of ADAPT actions, but he didn’t interview a single one of them that I remember. And it’s not like he didn’t let the camera linger on them constantly so it’s like “black people are here but I’m just going to film them over and over and over but not let them talk for some reason”.

(The other flaw is that even though the guy making the film has a cognitive disability, the film centers entirely on physically disabled people who sometimes basically almost outright say “We may not move like you but we think like you and that’s what’s important” (which I think is actually a quote from Cal Montgomery’s Critic of the Dawn, where she’s talking about that exact mentality – I think that’s where I remember hearing that phrase).) There are entire movements formed and led by cognitively disabled people, and cognitively disabled people have always been part of the phys-dis dominated disability rights movement, Billy Golfus is even one of them, yet everyone he interviewed was physically/sensory disabled and he sometimes made a point of saying their minds work just fine (and quoting them saying the same) as if like… if they didn’t, then things happening to them would be okay? I don’t know that he really meant that on any conscious level, but he certainly said it pretty much.

Anyway, I see that a lot in disability rights films – people show black people in the background, may even reference slavery (Billy Golfus did that, then focused in on another black person at an ADA rally, at that), but black people are never the ones talking, nor are most other people of color. The online autistic community (and offline communites that have grown from it) is so white (by American standards anyway – I know white-by-American-standards Jewish people aren’t considered white in some other parts of the world) that it’s embarrassing. The DD self-advocacy community tends to be better than most disability communities about racial and ethnic diversity, and some of the psychiatric c/s/x movements are almost as good at it. But even those can be very white-dominated at times. Just less than other elements of the disability community.

And I think it’s no coincidence that AutCom is more racially/etc. diverse than Autreat (although still not that diverse), and that it’s the DD community and the psych c/s/x communities that are the most diverse in terms of actual power people hold. And that’s because Autcom, the DD community, and the c/s/x communities, are rooted not in a disability identity group, but in a whole lot of people who’ve been thrown into the same sociological situation. And I’ve noticed more diversity (of every single kind possible) in disability who come from the same sociological situation like that, than in disability communities that are based on the type of disability you have or otherwise things besides a common life experience. Because when it’s a common life experience, that unites a much broader range of people than “we’re all autistic”. (And AutCom has historically been more the sorts of autistic people who would end up in the DD self-advocacy movement and who have a lot of common experiences, compared to Autreat. Hence the increase in diversity, although again even AutCom isn’t that diverse, it’s just more so than practically nothing.)

Anyway, I see this all the time, I’m glad someone is talking about it. Also Bush Sr. apparently called the ADA a “freeing of the slaves” (headdesk), don’t get me started on that.